Dell iDRAC Network Configuration with Linux

In any case, I was recently needing to have console access on a remote Dell PowerEdge R610 server (located on a different country). When I attempted to log in to its iDRAC using the documented (from the engineer that did the initial installation) IP address I got this:

Unfortunately, after a couple of minutes of searching here and there I realized that the iDRAC interface was not configured at all!

So, the obvious solution was to find a local engineer with physical access to the server in order to login using the rack’s KVM and during boot time press CTRL+E key combination…

And quickly get the iDRAC configuration screen…

However, like most enterprise class products, iDRAC provides operating system level utilities to do all the administration remotely. In Dell’s case, the tool we are looking for is called ‘racadm’ as part of Dell OpenManage Server Administration (OMSA) suite. Now, below you can see how simple is to do the network configuration of the iDRAC interface using this tool…

The IP addresses were intentionally masked with ‘X’. The first argument is the IP address we want for the iDRAC interface, the second is its subnet mask and the last one its default gateway IP address.

Verify that your changes actually took effect using the following command.

2 Responses

Thank you for sharing this information. I’m glad Dell provides and in-band linux tool to configure it. (if you ask me, if you can’t configure it without going into the bios, then it isn’t “enterprise” class)